Tue 22 April 2014

As mentioned, I am interested in
diversifying my OS knowledge further.
Joel mentioned he was
teaching an RTEMSOpen Class
in Munich last month so that was a perfect opportunity to take part.

So I booked a flight, and AirBNB room, and there I was! Coffee,
pretzels (I get it now!), class, beer, food, hacking - heavenly
really. It was a great experience. For many reasons!

Reasons the class was great, one: I learned a lot about RTEMS

Both usage and its internal structure, and real-time systems in general.
I had done some preparation beforehand so that I would get the most out of
the class, but both were something of a first for me.

Pictured above: Joel in front of the projection screen.

Two: I got to socialize with Joel

He lives in the US so we don't see each other much. It was great to
catch up a bit and talk about subjects ranging from technical RTEMS
subjects, to life and happiness and such things in general.

Left: me. Right: Joel.

We all know socializing is simply code for drinking
beer together, no?

Three: the Beagle BSP

Based on Joel's suggestion beforehand I had set myself the goal of
writing a BSP
for the Beagle family of products for
RTEMS. In other words, a port of RTEMS to the beagles; specifically
the BeagleBoard XM, BeagleBone 'White,' and the BeagleBone Black.
Joel mentioned this at the start of the 4-day class to the other
participants, so that raised the pressure to succeed within the class
timeframe significantly!

I hacked on it as much as I could between classes and socializing and
"on the last day" I got it working. I really enjoyed Joel demonstrating
it to the rest of the class! We hooked up my laptop to the projector
and went to town.

Pictured: Joel demonstrating RTEMS running on the Beaglebone Black that
I brought with me.

And, also on the last day:

I got a certificate! It really did feel like going back to school and it
was quite a nice experience.

Where to go

Claas Ziemke started an RTEMS BSP for
the original Beagleboard for a GSOC project, so he wrote the basis
for that page.

Chris started the wonderfully-named section
"Ben and Chris's Big Beagleboard Adventure" - I couldn't have phrased it
better, that's really what it feels like! Also sounds a bit like "Bill and Ted"
and I hope Chris meant it that way too.

What next, and: foreshadowing

I'm really delighted with how far the BSP has come, as it's a first
for me to do something with RTEMS, and indeed get any new OS working
almost-from-scratch on a new piece of hardware. Well.. That's an
exaggeration, as a lot of ARM support was already there. But still,
filling in a few more basics can make it feel like it's from-scratch!

The Beagles are such nice products that it's a real PR opportunity
for RTEMS too I believe, and I'm thrilled to be able to contribute
that to RTEMS.

I have spent a lot of time since then running the full test suite,
and cleaning up the BSP - mostly by minimizing it. Part of the
effort to merge this BSP with mainline is that I am working with
Chris to get the RTEMS executable
running from scratch using
JTAG. But
that is a topic of another, similarly exciting, post.